Posts tagged as weeknotes (page 11)

A good week. Much of it was spent on Hutton: a personal project I’m building to demonstrate some concepts for a talk. By the end of the week, I’d got a very solid web-based prototype, sketched out how the hardware version would work, and begun poking the hardware version into life:

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When not working on Hutton, I spent a day and half with Max Gadney and After The Flood in a pair of workshops. Both had great teams assembled, and it was a pleasure to explore and examine the concepts we were working on.

I was also very taken with Max’s “one rule” for workshops, which he detailed in an email beforehand:

The only rule is no swearing. I believe swearing shuts the brain down – focusses on the fight/flight imperative – and we need to be the opposite – synaptic anemones, happily tendrilling. And if swearing is not really allowed, then the opposite runs true: that I would encourage comedy, humour and jollity. It is good for the mind. Laughing clears the mind and opens it up to possibility.

You know what: I think he has a point. Even when used for emphasis or as part of jokes, it unwraps a particular facet of the brain. And by moving away from it, we stayed on a kind of focus, and told different kinds of jokes. We also managed – thanks to some generous contributions to the swearbox from Max – to buy coffee for everyone involved by 4pm. But it was a good insight that I think made the work better, and, I think, one I will institute in other workshops from now on.

What else did I do this week? Emails, of course. Many emails, and a pile of invoicing.

Oh, and it was announced that I’ll be speaking at O’Reilly’s Solid conference in May, over in San Francisco. More about that in my post on the subject.

A week of being head down. Primarily, on Contributoria: working up lots of new templates and a new workflow, discussing this with Dean and solving a lot of problems; fixing a few issues and deploying the new features.

When I wasn’t doing that, I spent an afternoon poking some electronics for a project I’m calling Hutton. Most of the time was spent with an Electric Imp, and I was really impressed with the out-of-box experience: not too long to get it connected, and with some canniness, there’s a lot you can do. It’s certainly a very responsive platform, and I can see myself using it a lot in the future. Otherwise, I was mainly soldering headers onto devboards and just poking some libraries. I hope to return to Hutton in week 71 – both the web-end of things, a browser-based prototype, and then rigging up some components that were befuddling me last week and seeing if a physical demo is possible.

And, in amongst all that: the usual tranches of email and planning, which never get faster.

Oh, and I almost forgot: we got to announce that Hello Lamp Post had been nominated for Designs of the Year. Needless to say, Ben, Sam, Gyorgyi and I are all very proud.

Back to the swing of things after a week away.

That primarily meant getting back in to Contributoria: adding some small features on the back-end, tracking down various snags, and getting up to speed on where the codebase was after a month away.

I also spent a day mentoring as part of the ODI’s Open Data In Practice course: feeding back on various exercises the attendees were completing, as well as helping them in their own personal exercises, writing code that went beyond their levels of experience. By the end of the day, there were some great presentations, and it’s always a delight to help people come to new understandings and see what’s possible with the information they have.

In amongst all that: various meetings, lots of thinking, and lots of getting back to velocity for what now feels like 2014 proper.

Nothing to report; off travelling! Back to normal for week 69.

Busy, scattered week, this.

Much of it was taken up with Botley – another productive meeting to work out where to devote the team’s energies, and then a day and a half of poking and prodding an API, building a tiny prototype to share some thinking with the team. Not a product in the slightest, just some sketching-in-code to work out the limits of systems and help us design them. I hope it’ll be useful to the team.

Not much on Seager to report – just a few last teething troubles to tidy up.

I had a fascinating meeting on Wednesday, which has led to a tiny proposal, for a project I’m calling Butser. It’s for a lovely client, with a really interesting problem, and could turn out to be a nice meaty-code-problem to keep me busy if it comes off. For now, though, we’re aiming to start small if we can get the funding. Definitely worth the time meeting up.

On Thursday, I went to a workshop organised by CDEC around what a Connected Products Studio – something they have a mind to creating in London – might entail. A rich, involved day, with a great room of expertise from small companies and technologists through to funders and facilitators; many thanks to Alex for organising and facilitating the programme.

And then, on Friday, I moved studio. I’ve been renting a desk from Makielab since I went freelance, and I can’t thank them enough for their hospitality. But needs change, and so I’ve moved into PAN‘s studio space. They’ve been good friends for a while, and have a space really suited to the shape a bunch of my practice is taking. I’m still in East London, of course.

A busy week and a bunch of moving. Week 68 I’m taking off – heading to the hills and having a bit of a retreat. I’ll be back for Week 69.

Pulled in lots of directions this week:

• A day wrapping up the month’s work on Contributoria/Haddington, laying the foundations for Dan’s work for the rest of the month.
• Paying my tax bill.
• Various meetings and lunches with friends, about interactive theatre and games culture, which were a nice tickle for the brain.
• Wrapping up a final set of bugfixes on Seager, which led to the startling discovery that 3G connectivity providers may will strip websockets from port 80 because of their lousy proxies – we lost some time to that one.
• A day of workshopping for the BBC on a project that I’m calling Botley for my references.

Fun, though: two concrete days at either end, and lots of little bits in the middle, tidying up and poking some other bits of technology in my spare time. One potential project has fallen through for the time being, though thankfully this isn’t too much of an issue; a couple of speaking engagements have emerged. Lots of focuses, then, but a solid week. One more like that, and then I’m heading to the hills for a week’s R&R.

The majority of the week was spent working on Contributoria (Haddington), following its launch the week before. No major errors to fix, but lots of features to roll out ASAP. It’s very much an “early” beta (rather than a perpetual beta) and we’d like to get the features people are expecting into the product as swiftly as we can; I’m hoping by February/March I’ll be focusing more on polishing and plussing, than on crawling through the critical backlog.

So that meant building core functionality, helping Dan set up outbound email, fettling servers, and getting our deployment tools polished and working for all of us. That went smoothly, and we’re now delivering at a nice pace.

A Monday spent at the Guardian offices also meant that we could show the product off in an editorial meeting, and we had a decent response – some sharp questions and good feedback. At this stage, almost all feedback is helpful, and it was nice to get a response direct from all the journalists on tap in those offices.

I also spent a little of the week debugging some issues with Seager, primarily around latency. Connected object need a degree of polish in their mere implementation to file off rough edges, even in this early prototype: how often they report to the network, what first configuration feels like. Lots of that’s been ironed out, and I’m going to talk more to the Bergcloud team next week about my experiences with the project.

And of course, handling email and inquiries about the future – and lining ducks up for the tax payment deadline.

Very quiet over the Christmas break.

That meant there was time to write this year’s Yearnotes, which put a lot into focus, and reminded me how much to be proud of this year there was. If you missed them over the holiday period, they’re probably worth your time.

On the first of January, Contributoria went live. This is the project I’ve been referring to as Haddington. I’ve written more about it here; suffice to say, it’s early days, and whilst I’m not hugely instrumental in the work, I’ll be continuing to lend a hand for a little longer – tightening various screws around the place. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops.

To that end, I spent the 2nd diving back into the project. On the 3rd, I largely wrapped up the work on Seager – the connected object prototype – and shipped it off to the client to see how it suits them.

Week 65 is when we begin again in anger: a few meetings, and a whole week on Haddington/Contributoria. Onwards, into 2014!

Last working week of the year.

Two days on Haddington, tightening a lot of screws and getting ready for January’s launch. I’ll have more to say about that in the New Year, I’m sure.

A meeting on Tuesday about a potential arts project. Likely I won’t be able to take it – but still worth spending an hour to help potential clients understand their problem better. Even if it doesn’t make my brief better, it will help somebody else’s, so it’s worth my time.

Seager has had a bit more work: producing a first draft of the documentation, making the web experience a bit smoother, tidying some rough edges. It’ll wrap up early in the new year.

And on Tuesday, a copy of Maker World arrived with a feature on the Literary Operator. Really proud of this – it’s came out well, and I’m glad it’s a project people respond to so well.

A few other things happened that I can’t really talk about until 2014, but it was a very good week to end the year with.

Today, I’m closing up shop until 2014, when the year begins in earnest – some consultancy, the public launch of Haddington, and for me, some time off and personal work, I think. I’ll speak more about all that soon.

Next on the list: writing Yearnotes, on the first 15 months of self-employment. They might arrive next week.

Most of Week 61 was spent on Haddington. Monday was spent onsite with the rest of the team, finalising the plan for the next few weeks, and building a few features that required some collaboration. The rest of the weeks was spent polishing of templates and interactions.

On Tuesday, I spoke about Cities As Platforms at Wearable Futures, which seemed to go down well – and the rest of the conference looked super-interesting. It was a shame I couldn’t stay longer, but Haddington called.

In around that, I fitted a tad of Seager in around the cracks, pushing forward on implementation, and bringing it close to an end-to-end prototype.

Next week’s the last week in the studio until 2014; I’m going to be working pretty much til the end of the week, focusing on Haddington and Seager.

Lots of things happening this week.

Primarily, a bulk of work delivering pages and functionality for Haddington. That took up most of the first half of the week. Work on this paused a little whilst I waited for the back-end code to move ahead, at which point it’d become clearer what front-end work was a next priority.

In the time that opened up, several new pieces of potential work emerged and began to be planned:

• Claife, a pitch for some research funding into connected objects; I’d be acting as a technical advisor and building out some of the functionality, as well as assisting in the design, if that comes to fruition.
• Botley, which will likely begin as some design workshops in the new year, before possibly turning into interaction or functional prototypes – we’re going to play things by ear. But for now, some workshops with a diverse group, looking at media products.
• Seager, a tiny project: helping an in-house R&D team at a company prototype a connected object.

Seager is already underway, and is proving to be as exciting as it is enjoyable. I spent some spare hours on Friday pulling together various strands with a breadboard of components, a bunch of Ruby and just enough C; progress came surprisingly fast. Really good fiero.

I also wrote my short talk for Wearable Futures: I’ll be speaking as part of the Wearable Cities strand, and talk a little about Cities as Platforms. That’s next Tuesday.

A good week, then: lots of things moving forward and some super-interesting work on the horizon. Next week, when I’m not at Ravensbourne, back to Haddington in earnest.

Just one day on Haddington, building forms and refining some of the interactions with them.

I spent a bit over a day on Housedon, rebuilding one page that had caused some issues, adding the last remaining feature, and hopefully bringing that in to land – whilst trying to stop the feedback loop from sprawling too much.

On Wednesday, I had a meeting with a potential future collaborator; I mainly ruminated about the design of connected objects.

Otherwise, though, not a lot, owing to being under the weather. It’s hard being ill when you’re freelance – I’ve managed to largely avoid it so far, but the cold weather got me, I think. Fortunately, it was a quiet week, and so not the worst time to fall ill – the only thing that fell by the wayside were my plans for personal projects. Still, hoping to shift the last remnants as I move into Week 60, when there’s less time I can afford to lose.

The majority of the week was spent on Haddington, focusing on some particularly gnarly Javascript for rich front-end interactions, working with Dean on confirming what various interactions should feel and work like, and meeting up with the editorial team to discuss requirements for writers.

On Friday, I spent a day at the ODI, acting as a mentor on the last day of their Open Data in Practice course. I spoke to the participants throughout the final day – which is largely dedicated to ‘making’. In particular, I helped a few of the groups with their work, discussing appropriate object design, and assisting with some CartoDB prototyping. The presentations at the end of the day were great, and it was as ever, always interesting to see how different people learn and think.

Not much to report; this week was spent plugging away at Haddington and seeing the team for a couple of days, which was very useful, if only to stop cutting code and use face-to-face time with one another to understand some of our assumptions.

I also put the transcription of my talk Driftwood online, which appears to have been well received. (And: as is customary every six months, patched up my Keynote Exporter tool to reflect current usage.)

Quiet, but busy.

This week, I began work on what I’m calling Haddington – though it already has an existing name. I’m working as part of a small team – primarily Dan Catt and Dean Vipond – on some new product development at the Guardian.

Primarily, I’m focusing on front-end development: bringing Dean’s designs to life, acting as another designer for him to bounce ideas off, and finessing a lot of the interactive elements of the site.

This week focused on wrapping my head around the site, building up the core static pages, and beginning to develop a set of components for building the templates out of. By the end of the week – according to iDoneThis, I had a lot of that in place and ready to share with the team. Next week is going to involve refactoring a lot of my Sass to make it a bit less wasteful and more modular – getting it into good shape for turning into dynamic templates on top of Dan’s code.

A week of writing; I delivered a new talk at Playark on Friday, which needed writing, and as ever, which eluded me until almost the day. However, it found some form by Tuesday night, and came together. It ended up being about a collection of my toys and games built around cities – from Tower Bridge to Hello Lamp Post – and looking at them with a somewhat Situationist lens. I’ll try to get it online soonish – it came out pretty well, and I had some very kind feedback. It was a really good day out, too, and a nice way to finish the week.

I also poked a little of Housedon, sorting out an issue with rendering Canvas elements on HiDPI screens – which had reared its head on Retina iPhones. I wasn’t sure how solvable this would be, but it was a nice exercise and the results came out rather nice.

Finally, I also lined a few things up for Haddington – a contract beginning next week. So far, that was just billing details, along with a healthy dose of brew install to get my computer ready for some new tools. I’m looking forward to it a lot.

Two conferences this week.

On Monday, Sam from Pan and I spoke at TwilioCon Europe about Hello Lamp Post. In a brief ten-minute session on the “Inspire” track, we outlined the project and talked a little about the process of designing conversational interactions, and how to use the affordances of the city in the most appropriate manner. We also got to share some of the outcomes of the project – primarily statistical, but still nice to show people the reach of such work, and also the repeat-visitors we managed to generate. It seemed to go down well with the audience.

Friday was Playful, which served in part as a day out with the tribe, and in part a place to park my brain and let it have new thoughts. My notes from the day are as much notes to myself about ideas I’ve had as notes on the talk. As ever, I particularly enjoyed the talks that focused on craft – a place between exploring, playing, expertise, and knuckling down and doing the hard work. I had a good time, and was pleased with where my thoughts went by the end of the day – some nice new ideas, some confirmation of my own thoughts, and some useful challenges to my own processes.

On Thursday, I saw Kars for lunch. We catch up about every three months, just to talk about where our thoughts and processes are, what the shape of work for both of us looks like. And of course, we inevitably talk about interaction and game design. It was a great lunch with a good friend, but also valuable to share knowledge with another practitioner – if only to get an external perspective on your own work, to remind you that things aren’t necessarily as they seem inside the bubble. That’s fed well into what I’m loosely describing as Yearnotes, and I’ll hopefully write that up soon.

The rest of the week was, as a result, fairly scattered. Some more tidying up of Housedon, some small pieces of writing, some sketching and poking. Nothing vast, but not all weeks can be; sometimes, you just keep poking things forward.

This week was primarily spent on the trickier issues of Housedon – integrating old code that there wasn’t scope to rewrite, primarily, along with more complex pieces of new code such as audio playback.

I spent Friday at the REACT Objects Sandbox Ideas Lab in Bristol. An interesting workshop – met a lot of new people, did some exploration of a pile of ideas very quickly, and gave my design brain a little workout and some space to play. I haven’t got a group to pitch with yet, and I’m still wondering if I’ll push further on.

Regardless, it was useful to attend, nontheless, and gave some shape to other ideas around connect objects that I’ve been having. If anything, it’s reminded me I really want to poke Bluetooth Low Energy as a prototyping platform along with Phonegap.